


could you go and run into me

by lesbianchrispine (Sher_locked_up)



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: 2007-2017, AU where nobody dates anybody except when it's convenient for me, Angst and Humor, Love, M/M, Rimming, and a little smut, because where would we be without rimming, epic scene breaks, pinto: a retrospective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-10
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-12-13 20:12:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11767479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sher_locked_up/pseuds/lesbianchrispine
Summary: It takes them ten solid years. Because of course it does.





	could you go and run into me

**Author's Note:**

> there’s a about as much hand-waving, navel-gazing hipster bullshit going on in this fic as you might expect. things i did not feel like doing include: spending way too much time trying to figure out when each of them were dating literally anyone like i just wrote it as AU they never meet anybody but each other and like this one OC. oh and the titles of both the fic itself and the scenes within the fic are from Phoenix’s “Lasso” which is a song i know pretty well but honestly don’t have super strong feelings about otherwise. it’ll make sense when u get there. at least i hope.
> 
> my eternal thanks to all my favorite cheerleaders. this fic would not exist without you guys.

**so lonely so pretty such a lack of diplomacy (november 2007)**

Chris probably won’t even remember this, at least, for one thing.

That’s what Zach had told himself anyway, when he knocked back two more shots of Jack Daniels than he’s allowed himself since spring semester 2001, before doing his level best to suck on his brand new friend-and-colleague’s tongue so adroitly he’d feel it all the way down to his dick.

And now his stomach is doing a weird thing. It might be okay. He might need to bounce. He definitely doesn’t want to go in search of their original partners. It’d never bothered him to date a guy who was bisexual before but he’d also never had a guy more or less dump him mid-party to go and fuck Chris Pine’s date in a first-floor bathroom. After a stupid kissing game. During which he and Chris might have made out for like, two and a half seconds. Ok, maybe thirty seconds. Five minutes? Who even can tell time right now. The point is, it wasn’t like they fucked or anything. Javier was very seriously overreacting if he thought that putting his dick inside Chris’s date was remotely the same as Zach putting his tongue inside Chris’s mouth.

Mmm. Chris’s mouth, though.

Probably the best part about all of it is how few fucks Chris seems to give. He watched it all happen and gave that gorgeous self-effacing grin of his, shrugged, clapped Zach on the back and kissed his cheek and chalked it up to “another story to tell the grandkids.”

 _Whose_ grandkids, Zach would like to know!

He must have been standing there looking like an idiot for a while because eventually Karl comes up to him and hands him a beer, clinks his own against it, and maneuvers him from the living room out onto the patio. Zach stares stupidly at the drink in his hand ( _definitely_ a bad idea, but he takes a swig anyway, and wouldn’t you know? It’s ice cold and bubbly and it kinda helps) as Karl leans back against the railing.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Karl says, as if he’s inside Zach’s idiot head reading Zach’s idiot thoughts. “It happens on films like these. I can’t even tell you how much spit-swapping I saw go down filming _Lord of the Rings_.”

“Oh yeah?” Zach’s stomach threatens to heave and he burps and swallows and mentally shushes it. “Who’d you kiss?”

“No one, because I am a married man.”

Zach just looks at him.

“No one I care to mention,” Karl concedes, “because I am a gentleman of honor and discretion.”

Zach snorts.

“I just mean, by the time we wrap, I’d bet good money we’ll all have done some pretty weird shit. What happens on set, stays on set, and all of that.”

The thing about Anton is he’s small and sneaky and Zach doesn’t even notice he’s there until he pipes up, “Is everybody kissing each other now? Did I miss it? Where’s Zoë?”

Karl shakes his head in mock-disgust and puts a hand up to stop Anton’s forward momentum by holding him at bay by the forehead. “Easy, tiger,” he says, “we’re talking about Zach and Chris.”

“Well shit, even better.”

Karl flips his grip so quickly Anton never stands a chance, and falls victim to a seriously vigorous noogie. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, kid. There’ll be sequels yet, after this.”

“If we could maybe get back to the issue of how I accidentally tongue-fucked my co-star within an inch of public indecency during the first week of filming,” Zach interrupts. He doesn’t mean to be rude but also doesn’t care if he is because that sick panicky feeling is getting worse, not better, and he can’t tell if the dampness of his palms is the perspiration off the beer bottle or a sign he’s about to vomit.

“And lost him his date,” Karl adds helpfully.

“Wait, does that mean she’s available? Because—”

“Shut up, Anton,” both Zach and Karl manage to say this in unison, and despite the sweat forming on his upper lip, Zach feels a little better about everything in that moment.

Anton shrugs and steals Zach’s beer and heads back inside, presumably in search of someone who hasn’t already rounded the bend past the point of drunk-stupid and well into drunk-morose.

Karl slaps a meaty hand across Zach’s back hard enough to jostle the delicate state of all that liquor sloshing around in Zach’s belly. “Like I said, mate. Water under the bridge. By tomorrow it’ll be gossip, and by next week you’ll have an entire harem of good-looking PAs ready and available to stroke your, er. _Ego_.” He grins and swigs his beer and winks before heading back inside, probably to save Anton from himself.

Zach thinks about what Karl said for approximately 47 seconds before he turns and folds himself over the railing of the patio to neatly empty the contents of his stomach down onto the topiary below.

 

**it is such a waste (april 2009)**

It’s actually pretty funny, at least to Chris anyway, that it ends up happening.

He _knows_ he’s not supposed to Google himself, or set up alerts for anyone else, and he _especially_ knows he’s not supposed to do any of that for Zach. Like, literally ever. Telephoto lenses.

But you can’t really get around in this world without seeing a few things you’ve been explicitly warned not to go looking for and Chris has to say, if an utterly weird yet inexplicably appealing theory out there were about to be proven true, this one is as good as any.

Due to some kind of _hilarious_ hotel glitch he and Zach are bunking up. It wasn’t really anyone’s idea exactly it just turns out the hotel has fewer rooms than it thought it did, and for some reason everyone’s natural assumption is that Chris and Zach are the happiest to share. And whether or not Chris may have accidentally lost an entire Thursday exploring a hashtag called “bedsharing” after making his first ill-advised leap into fanfiction obviously has nothing to do with the amount of humor his guilty conscience fails to provide for the situation.

Mainly: it freaks Chris the fuck out, if he’s honest. Not bunking with Zach— _that_ he’s thrilled about, but like, the way he’s thrilled right before plummeting through the sharpest dip in a rollercoaster. It’s just that it seems a little too much like he willed the situation into existence after an endorphin-fueled night of too much beer and way too much internet combined with latent but constant sexual frustration and the itty bitty crush he sorta might be harboring for the one person he’s absolutely for sure not supposed to fuck. And now he and Zach are sharing a bed and Chris actually feels somehow culpable and shit is probably gonna get weird.

Zach’s loosening his tie and tossing things on top of and over the backs of armchairs, completely cool and casual, unbuttoning his collar and gesturing toward the king-size bed. “Do you have a preference?”

“Excuse me?”

“A side?” Zach’s looking at him like he’s an idiot. “Of the bed, Christopher.”

 _Right_. Chris is genuinely not at all proud of what he’d been thinking a minute ago. “I dunno? Depends. Wait. Where’s the ocean?”

Zach rolls his eyes and huffs out, “Unbelievable,” on a laugh that has no bite as he heads toward the bathroom. “I’m gonna shower. You figure out your feng shui, Obi-Wan.”

“That’s Star _Wars_ , Zachary dear. We talked about this.”

Zach flips him the bird over his shoulder before shutting the door between them.

 

**i’ve been thinking out loud (february 2012)**

“You should probably know that I’m not speaking to you,” Zach says with the gale force of a tropical storm as he stalks thunderously on set and toward the makeup trailer. Chris was with him only a moment ago, but veered off toward his own trailer to grab a shower and change his clothes first. His _gym_ clothes.

If there’s one expression John Cho has yet to master in his repertoire, it’s wide-eyed innocence. It doesn’t help that Karl is standing next to him and has absolutely no poker face at all.

“Are you not speaking to me specifically, or both me and Karl, or, like, _everyone_ —”

“You know damn well I mean _you_.”

John huffs as if he’s actually remotely concerned. “Then _you_ should know Karl was in on it like, the whole time.”

“Maybe so, but Karl doesn’t have the pop culture references—”(“ _Hey_ ,” Karl tries to interject, but Zach knows it’s posturing; the man’s never used Youtube)—“or the _spirit of satan trapped in his body_ so I’m gonna go ahead and feel really good about blaming it all on you.” Zach crosses his arms in front of his chest and hopes he’s managing to be at least a little bit intimidating. For fuck’s sake, didn’t _any_ of them watch _Heroes_?

“Come on, Zach, you can’t just expect us to take neutron cream lying down,” Karl protests.

John’s eyes are still doing that thing he thinks telegraphs some kind of innocuousness as he spreads his arms wide, palms-up. “It’s just some harmless fun! Sometimes it’s like he doesn’t even live on the same planet as the rest of us. What respectable liberal _doesn’t_ know about Lindsay Fünke’s iconic SLUT tee shirt?”

Karl starts giggling all high-pitched like a lady hyena, so Zach just scowls some more and resists the urge to knock the two of their heads together. “Hilarious. Truly droll. Do you asswipes even comprehend the amount of unnecessary hoopla that shit creates? All those body builder bros with shriveled balls and something to prove will not stop hanging around us the entire time we’re working out. And Chris is such a fucking _moron_ he just goes with it, like maybe suddenly every dude with an inferiority complex is just really super interested in being best friends with the hot twink in the bright red muscle tank that screams _slut_ on the front in all caps, like that’s just a fucking _coincidence_.” He shakes his head. “Can you even begin to understand how much work it is just to keep the sharks at bay?”

And Zach really should have known better, should have stopped at the bit about not speaking to them, because that’s when John gets the sort of grin on his face that ought to worry people. It worries Zach enough.

“And why, pray tell,” John says with a voice like he’s about to reveal the eighth wonder of the world, “do you even care? Why would any of that even bother you? Chris is a grown man. He can take care of himself. Hell, he should be able to get himself laid if he wants to, shriveled balls or not.” Then John does a sort of thinking pose, like he’s trying to be extra fucking annoying as he drives home his point. “It’s almost as if you have some kind of huge, embarrassing crush on your co-star that’s been going on for _years_ , and because you’re too pigheaded to pass Chris a note to ask if he _like_ -likes you, you follow him around all day and night to be sure nobody else gets a sip of that Kool Aid—”

“Hey, Cho!” Chris is half-jogging over, hair wet and fresh white tee shirt clinging infuriatingly to his damp skin, still rubbing a hand towel over the back of his neck, “Can you hook Zach up with one of those shirts you got me, the red one I’ve been wearing to work out? You would not _believe_ how many numbers I scored at the gym today.”

John’s eyebrows shoot up into his hairline but before he can so much as open his mouth Zach growls, “Not _one_ word,” and stalks away.

 

**what you do well you should do to me (may 2014)**

Abe is Zach’s current _whatever_ , and Chris has become politely friendly with a fair few of Zach’s previous _whatevers_ , but Abe he honestly likes. Despite the melancholy of his looks, Abe’s light and playful and actually funny, knows a million stories about people Chris doesn’t know but still finds fucking hilarious. Abe’s handsy, but not in a cheap way; he’s physical, he tackles and gives bear hugs and rolls around in the grass with dogs. He wholly unruffles Zach in a way that’s deeply satisfying to Chris, and fuck it, he knows Abe’s not built to last—they only very rarely are, this soon after a breakup—but Chris likes him.

Of course out of all the guys Zach’s dated Abe would be the most tragically good-looking; his handsomeness hangs off of him as though at some point it became too difficult for him to stoically bear. His eyelids and the corners of his mouth droop downward, his nose is long and, while not indelicate, it flares a bit beneath the bridge almost as a reminder to everyone else that perfection is not a virtue. Chris thinks he looks like a sort of hard times version of Robert Downey Jr., if Robert Downey Jr. were still in his thirties and had curly hair that was just to the left of too long. He’s tall, too, like Zach, and lean and dark, and the two of them together is too much of something Chris can’t quite put his finger on.

They’re sitting in Zach’s living room drinking beer and pretending to watch something on FX and Noah can’t sit still to save his entire four legged life so Chris crawls onto the carpet and gives him the attention he demands. He scratches Noah’s floppy ears and rubs his face and starts to fuck with him a little bit, throwing a gentle arm over the back of his neck in a quasi-half nelson and giving a vaguely doglike growl. Noah lets out a little _boof_ and backs away, runs at Chris again and sticks his wet muzzle in Chris’s face, and then suddenly it’s an all-out wrestling match and then Abe is on the floor too and they’re rolling around trying to catch Noah’s furry little feet as they run all over the place.

Chris rolls away and then accidentally smacks right into Abe, hipbone-to-hipbone, and Abe laughs and goes in for a tackle. There are limbs everywhere and Chris isn’t sure how but in a half a minute he’s flat on his stomach and grunting “Uncle!”

Abe pushes up but not entirely off. “That was too easy, Pine. They airbrush those muscles on you in the magazines?”

“How often are you jacking it to photos of me, anyway,” Chris laughs and shoves Abe the rest of the way off.

“You guys know I’m, like, right here?” Zach kicks at Abe ineffectually and then pats the spot next to him on the couch. Noah jumps up immediately and settles with his head in Zach’s lap. “Never mind. You two can stay on the floor.”

Abe hops up and plants a hand on the couch on either side of Zach’s thighs, leans down and gives him a big messy kiss. “You know you’re the star of my spank bank.”

“That is a… dubious honor,” Zach says, but his eyes are fond and Chris really honestly likes it, how Abe manages to smooth some of the edges off him.

Whatever torch he’s been carrying for Zach all these years… well it’s just that, isn’t it? A little firelight, something kinda warm to cling to when they end up on the same coast for longer than a few days and they’re at loose ends. They’ve always been so good at the flirting thing and so terrible at the talking thing and Chris has more or less accepted the fact that some crushes last lifetimes. And Abe seems, by and large, truly a decent guy.

The reality of which does not factor the least bit into the vague and unsettling relief that comes over Chris when Zach drags him out the following week on a random Wednesday night pilgrimage to some hot new club, sans-Abe, wearing that tight black sweater-thing Chris knows is basically Zach’s bat signal that he’s cruising.

They’re only there long enough to grab a couple drinks and a couple shots before Zach’s eye-fucking some skinny Panic! at the Disco type and waving Chris off with the whole _I might come back I might not come back whatever do your own thing_ vibe and Chris can’t bring himself to mind too much. Zach’s a slut on the dance floor and a downright lady at closing time. Acts like he isn’t all keyed up and totally ready to stick his dick anywhere wet that’ll have him, brushes off the dude he’s just been grinding boner-to-boner for a solid hour like it’s some kind of insulting if the poor guy thought he might stand a chance at a nightcap without an engraved, timestamped invitation. Anyway, sometimes Chris likes to watch.

That’s what he’s doing anyway, when a familiar long, knuckle-strong set of fingers clutches his forearm. “Chris!”

Chris turns and there’s Abe, all rail-thin six-foot-four of him, with eyes like a dollop of melting chocolate in milk. “Hey!” Chris manages.

Abe’s slow smile is molasses-sweet as he drawls, “What a whole lotta fancy it is meetin’ you here.”

Chris grins weakly and looks Abe up and down, and if Zach’s tight black sweater-thing is his universal indicator for _down to fuck_ , then Abe’s tight black leather-whatever that’s happening in his southern hemisphere must be code for all kinds of kinky shit Chris doesn’t know about. “Likewise.”

Abe laughs. “Don’t look so caught out, man. It’s all good. Zach and I have an understanding.”

Chris shrugs. “None of my business.”

“It could be.”

Abe kisses _hard_ and _quick_ , is about as much as Chris’s brain is able to retain before it’s over so fast he can’t even be sure it happened, and they’re both leaning on the bar again, face-to-face, only somehow Abe’s hand is on Chris’s hip, two of his fingers locked around a belt loop.

“Whoa,” Chris says, laughs because he’s not sure what else to do, “listen, Zach is—”

“A big boy, just like you are. Just like I am.” Abe yanks Chris close again and puts his mouth right up against his ear and Chris can feel him grinning at his own innuendo. “Don’t worry; Zach knows how it works.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Chris insinuates a hand between them and pushes it flat against Abe’s chest, just hard enough to buy himself a foot and a half of space. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘how this works,’ but if you wanna know how _this_ works, Zach is—”

And Chris is really looking forward to delivering the second half of his tirade until he sees from over Abe’s left shoulder the look on Zach’s face as he approaches.

“I—uh, actually—Zach is... here.” Lame, lame-lame-lame-lame- _lame_.

And that’s about as much as Chris wants to say about the whole thing once Zach grabs onto Abe’s arm and _yanks_ , so he takes the opportunity to step away and head outside to light up. He gives Zach a sort of, _I’ll be out there_ head tilt. Definitely time to tap out of that ring.

Chris is just stubbing out the end of his cigarette with the toe of a shoe that probably cost more than his first car when Zach storms outside and over like a Chris-seeking missile.

Chris looks up. “Hey, man, I’m—”

“Did you and Abe hook up?”

Chris blinks. “What, just now? We’ve been here for like, five seconds.”

“No.” Zach’s eyes are darker than Chris has ever seen them, glittering all over the place, manic.

Chris is so startled he forgets how to move his mouth.

“Did you?” Zach’s nostrils flare.

“Zach,” Chris says when he finally finds his voice, “what the fuck.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Because you deserve one?” Chris rakes a hand through his hair and huffs in disbelief, turns away. “I’m so fucking angry at you right now, I can’t even look at you.”

“It’s a fair question.”

“IT IS A RIDICULOUS QUESTION,” Chris roars as he turns back around and gets right up into Zach’s space. He’s goddamned _furious_ , and a little scared of what he might do if Zach doesn’t get that self-righteous Mother Superior stern look off his fucking face. He pulls back. “I need to get away from you right now.”

As Chris is walking away he can hear Zach’s snort of disbelief. “You think I didn’t notice you never fucking answered me, asshole?”

Chris stops for a beat, then turns just halfway back, because he honestly can’t bring himself to be any closer. “You want a fucking answer? Fine, you got it. He kissed me. I stopped it.”

There’s a heavy silence, and before Zach can open up his mouth again and really piss Chris off, Chris holds up a hand. “That’s not my relationship with him,” he says, quietly. “And it’s not my relationship with you.”

Zach’s strong features contort into a cartoonish sort of sneer. “C’mon Chris. It’s you. You have sex with all your friends. You have sex with all your _friends’_ friends. You have sex like it’s a fucking handshake.”

“That’s not fair—”

“It’s more than fair! The first week of filming _Trek_ your date fucked off with my date after we made out at that house party, and then _you_ went home with JJ’s PA! I _know_ you’ve fooled around with at least half of the set design guys. And the coatroom, at Nobu, with Benedict? _Everyone_ knows about that.”

“Good to know you’ve been keeping track.”

“It’s not like I’m trying to! Fuck, Chris. It gets around. _You_ get around. That’s who you are; there’s nothing _wrong_ with it. It’s just for you, sex is something you do for fun, something you can do with your friends and wake up the next day and go on with your lives not so much as if it never happened, but more like it happened on some fantastic vacation that has no bearing on real life. You have sex like it’s just something to do.”

“Really,” Chris says. “ _Really_ , that’s what you think. Okay, maybe I do have sex with a lot people. Maybe I do have casual sex with people who want to have casual sex with me, because yeah, sex is fun, and there’s no reason it needs to mean anything if neither of us wants it to. And believe me, I get it, that somehow you think you’re better than me because you’re _not_ like that. Because you’re some crazy serial monogamist whose sex life is obviously morally superior because it comes with a side of Sunday shopping at Crate  & Barrel or whatever the fuck. That’s fine too. But if you felt like spending one single second of this conversation being intellectually honest with yourself you’d realize it really has nothing to do with me. So why don’t you go ahead and tell me what your problem really is, huh? Why don’t you tell me what you’re really pissed about.”

Zach gapes and it’s satisfyingly unattractive. “And how would _you_ know what I’m like? You’ve never bothered to even try and find out!”

Chris breathes out, long and low, lets some heretofore unknown reserve of cool wash over him before he speaks. “You know what, Zach? You’re right. You’re right, I haven’t. But you’re wrong, too. It’s not because I don’t want to. Believe me, I’ve thought about you fucking me out of my own damn mind so many times it’s fucking embarrassing. But I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t want you to do it. I didn’t want that with you, not like that.” He closes his eyes, wills the words out of the churning mess of his belly, into his throat, hopes his voice isn’t shaking too badly. “I had no idea if it was ever gonna happen with us. With you. I just knew I wanted to hold onto it and save it, to see if it did. With you, I wanted it to be more than a fucking handshake.”

He leaves Zach there by the door of the club, doesn’t bother looking back.

He gets about twelve blocks away before he remembers that, fuck, he’s staying at Zach’s, doesn’t have a thing on him except his phone (Motorola, circa 2004, almost dead) and a handful of crumpled bills in his pocket (and a few cards, the essentials, held together with a black binder clip). Well, he’s got cash, he’s got ID, and he’s got Amex. Everything else Zach can fucking keep.

And yeah, it’s the middle of the night, but it’s New York, so Chris rents a muscle car, something extravagant and stupid and they definitely shouldn’t have let him have it, drives all the way to JFK pushing ninety, passing indiscriminately on the left or right. Some weird morbid fatalistic part of him, some unresolved Berkeley lit major cliché of utter bullshit still clinging to the sole of his Converse All-Stars kinda hopes he fucking wrecks it.

 

 **  
** **such a fallout/not only that you’re lonely (july 2014)**

Zach is really and truly surprised when Chris even takes his call, but stops short of being pleased when Chris also doesn’t _actually_ answer the phone. He definitely hits “accept,” but he doesn’t say a goddamned word. He just _sighs_. And _waits_.

“Pine?” He _distinctly_ does not recall allowing his vocal chords to strike quite so tentative a note.

“Zach.” It’s clipped. “What’s up?”

Zach blows out a heavy breath right into the phone: _fuck it_. “I fucked that all up.”

“You sure did.”

“I didn’t mean for it to get like that—I didn’t intend to go after you like that.”

“And yet, here we are.” Chris has never stayed mad at him for this long, not even the time Zach lost his lucky tee shirt in that hotel laundry service in Tokyo, the one Chris was wearing that night when Julia Louis-Dreyfus grabbed him by the jaw and kissed him on the mouth at that Tonys afterparty in Soho.

Zach spreads his hands out in front of him in the most conciliatory gesture he knows even though Chris can’t see them and says, “I owe you an apology.”

The pause before Chris replies is a touch longer than Zach would have preferred.

“Took you six weeks to figure that out?”

“Yes—No, of course not—I mean, I’m still kind of figuring shit out, but—what I mean is, it’s kind of like…” He lets out another frustrated huff of breath. “You know, the whole thing, with the alternate timelines?”

“Zach…” Chris sighs again and Zach can _feel_ his impatience, can picture the whole tableau of it, Chris at home on the sofa in some hideous woollen cardigan, bare feet propped up and crossed on the coffee table, the fingers of one hand holding his place in a dog-eared paperback while the other pinches the bridge of his nose in consternation. “It doesn’t count as an apology if I have to explain why you owe it to me.”

“No, no, hear me out. It’s like… I was fucking blindsided, man; I don’t know. You play this weird shit out in a movie or two, you talk about it a little too much while passing the blunt a few nights a week, it gets all stuck in your head, you know? And suddenly it was like… I was in one of those timelines, and it doesn’t make any sense, but I couldn’t _breathe_ I was so angry to be there. So angry at you for being there with me. Like I was trapped or something, but you weren’t. Like we walked into that club and suddenly the entire universe was five feet to the right of where we left it and I kept banging into sharp corners trying to find you.” Zach shuts his eyes. “I’m a fucking _idiot_ , if that helps.”

“Yeah, you are,” Chris agrees. “And that’s the lamest excuse for being genuinely shitty for no good reason I have ever heard. You got all up in my fucking face because you imagined you were stuck in an alternate universe where I was messing around with some guy you dated? Jesus, Zach. Do you know how messed up that sounds? How can you not get it?”

Zach can’t really say anything around the lump that’s just lodged itself in his throat so he swallows audibly and shakes his head, which, whatever the fuck, Chris seems to somehow understand.

“Even if your fucked up bullshit explanation of why you went completely insane on me made any kind of sense,” Chris is saying, and Zach kinda snaps back into focus at that, “the fact remains that there is literally _no_ universe, no timeline that exists, in which I would _ever_ do anything like that to you.”

“What—no, that’s not even—that isn’t even the _point_ Christopher, I know you—oh my _god_. That’s not what I’m saying at _all_.” It’s so hard to do this without being able to show Chris his hands, his palms-up supplication that presupposes Chris’s innocence, his _goodness_ , above all else. How do you even _say_ that in words? “I just—it’s not anything like that. Fucking Abe, like, who cares? I just. You know. If there are infinite possible versions of us and somehow everything got all… _weird_ , or whatever. That’s just. Not how I wanted it to be.” Zach clears his throat. “Between us.”

Chris is quiet for a long moment and Zach’s a little afraid he just put his own head up on a pike _pour encourager les autres_ but then Chris sighs _again_ , only this one is a better kind of sigh, the kind of sigh when everything is mostly worked out and it’s exhausting to keep going on about it and things are gonna definitely un-fuck themselves in short order. “I really shouldn’t let you get away with this kind of crap but coming from you that was practically a proposal.”

Zach grins wider than he has in six weeks and his face hurts with it, he forgot what it felt like to grin that wide. “Only for you, Pine.”

“Don’t I know it,” Chris snorts. “I missed you, you asshole.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Zach says, and he really means it, more than he probably ever has before, which is sorta fucked up if he thinks about it too hard. “I missed you too. You wanna…. You think you might be coming back east anytime soon?”

“Hmm, I dunno,” and Zach can picture this one too: Chris sitting up a little straighter, maybe his feet have hit the rich soft carpet, and he’s stroking his fingers through his salt and pepper beard mock-thoughtfully as he considers. “Are you gonna embarrass me in public by going all caveman on anyone who comes within a five foot radius of my sweet, sweet California nectar?”

Zach groans like he’s in pain, and he’s pretty sure he means at least 35-50% of it. “You’re vile, you know that? Like, actually literally _completely_ insufferable.”

“You love it.”

The thing is, Zach does. Quite a bit, if he’s honest. And it doesn’t even feel that weird, not really. Now that they both kinda know about it. It’s something Zach’s always admired about Chris: his ability to appreciate a little relevant trivia, if only for its own sake.

 

**forever is a long long time (september 2014)**

So: Zach wants him.

It’s not exactly _news_ , or anything, not any more than it ought to be news to Zach that Chris wants _him_ (has always wanted him) right back, but still. It’s nice, with someone like Zach, to have verbal confirmation. Or whatever the fuck that was over the phone that time.

They never talk about it, after that. Doesn’t seem like much more needs to be said. Just because an ongoing reality becomes explicit doesn’t make it different than it was a few months ago. Even if sometimes it can feel that way.

And— _fuck_ , Chris has never been the type to, like, get off on being withholding or whatever; if anything, he’s excessively generous in that department. He doles it out—praise, hugs, touches, orgasms—in the same generous helpings that echo all the parts of his body that tend to get involved in the process. If his full mouth and his big hands and, ok yeah, his enormous ass were made for all of that, what can he say? It’s kismet.

But like, he can’t lie to himself. He won’t. The idea of being a little bit withholding, just enough to frustrate, to score a few points off Zachary Quinto specifically? The self-proclaimed King of All that is Too Cool? It’s all kinds of appealing.

The nice thing about it, Chris decides, is that he really doesn’t have to do anything about it right now. If his own feelings on the matter are any indication, he has all the time in the world, and _he_ isn’t the one who made an earnest love confession from three thousand miles away, stupid-sober on a Tuesday. He can leave Zach hanging just about as long as he likes after that. Pretend like it never even happened for a few more weeks, or even months, hell, _years_. Well, probably not years. He’ll have to do _something_ sooner than that, even if it’s just to fuck with him. Much as he’d like, Chris can’t pretend he’s ever been that kind of patient.

 

 **  
** **don’t you know don’t do it (may 2015)**

It actually is a full year and clear across the whole country before Zach runs into Abe again. They’re out west in LA gearing up for filming and maybe he should have been surprised but it somehow seems sort of inevitable when Abe catches his eye from across the crowded hotel bar. Of all the hotel bars in all of downtown Los Angeles.

There isn’t a smooth, civil way to get out of it, especially not now that the bartender’s working on his cocktail, so Zach grins to show his incisors and Abe burrows his way over and beside him.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”

“Abraham.”

Abe gives a wicked grin. “There are only two reasons a man three-syllables another man’s name, and I don’t suspect you’re about to tell me I’m grounded.”

“Aren’t you?”

Abe’s smile falters, but only just; he recovers almost like a pro. He’s been in LA a few months, then. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were pissed at me.”

“ _Do_ you know better?” Zach accepts his manhattan and slides a few bills across the bar as he takes a sip and quirks one single, phenomenal eyebrow.

“There was a time I’m sure I did,” Abe replies easily. “You ghosted me, man.” He leans, leers, “Were you afraid of falling in love?”

Zach laughs and it’s actually pretty genuine. He doesn’t mean it like that of course, but it’s just so funny, when Abe puts it that way. “You have no idea.”

“Mmm tell me about it, then?” Abe’s eyes have gone half-lidded despite the enormity of his pupils and all at once, Zach’s pretty goddamned tired of all of it.

“There were rules,” he says, shrugs.

The shape of Abe’s mouth curls unattractively. “Rules.”

“Look, I know I never gave off any impression I even gave a fuck—and truly, honestly, most of the time I didn’t. We had fun, it was good. I wasn’t paying attention. You just picked the wrong way to try and make me.”

“Is this about _Chris_? Babe, like, honestly, if a straight tree blows a dick in the forest—”

“Probably you should be shutting up now,” Zach says, and his voice is dangerous and low and slick like cut glass, like really good wine, for once delivers the line exactly how he wants it to. “You shouldn’t have done that. And you _definitely_ shouldn’t have used him to get back at me.”  

Now Abe’s laughing, but it’s manic and it’s fake and it just makes Zach feel so incredibly calm, calm like he never thought he’d be about this. “It’s sad, you know? The two of you. It’s fucking pathetic.” Abe sniffs hard and wipes his nose on his sleeve and Zach almost feels a little bad for him, ‘cause that’s a rookie tell. “The fag with no feelings and the straight-boy-homecoming-king with _all_ of them. Fucking obsessed with each other but you can’t grow a pair between you to do anything about it.”

Zach smiles warmly and squeezes Abe’s upper arm with his free hand. “It was _really_ nice seeing you.”

And that, there? The look on Abe’s face, when Zach _didn’t_ lose his shit and dump his drink all down the front of that hideously tacky Versace button up? Chris would have loved to see that.

 

**but you say yes too (july 2016)**

“Okay okay okay, my turn!” Zoë’s waving her arms around trying to get the attention of the room and it works because she’s Zoë and they’re all drunk enough to ignore just about anybody else. They’ve been taking turns calling the next drinking game and they’re all right in that sweet spot where they could dissolve into giggles and drunk munchies and, eventually, sleep; or, they could push themselves right over the edge of the cliff and into the oblivion of a blackout night. Chris feels itchy and reckless and too big for his own skin, and he knows which self-destructive tendency he prefers. He’s not alone: one by one, Zach, John, Karl, Simon, and Sofia all stop talking and turn to Zoë with attentive eyes.

It’s been a tough press tour, a tough premiere. It wasn’t what they thought it would be. Sure, the film’s _fantastic_ and universally lauded as the best yet, and sure, they’re signed on for even more, and they all feel pretty good about that. But it’s not the same, down one crew member.

It’s not something they talk about a lot, not explicitly. But they’ve all been coping in a myriad of less than healthy ways, if Chris is honest, and they’ve definitely played a lot more drinking games.

“Okay here are the rules: it’s like a mix of spin the bottle, and never have I ever.” Zoë plunks an empty wine bottle down on the coffee table they’re seated around. They’re all piled into Chris’s living room: he feels kinda obligated to host after an LA premiere, because he’s not attached and doesn’t have any kids and they can stay and get real drunk and loud and all have plenty of space to crash. Besides, what did he buy this whole big house for if not exactly this?

“That sounds like a pretty dangerous combination, Zo.” John waggles his eyebrows.

“Don’t worry, there’s no touching involved.”

“ _Aw_.” John looks genuinely disappointed and Karl throws a big tanned arm around him.

“It’s all right, Cho. We can still make out.” Chris knows they’re joking, but John kinda looks seriously enticed. Well. It wouldn’t be the first time. Karl blushes and clears his throat. “Anyway, Zoë?”

“Thank you. Okay, so like, obviously, there’s a bottle, so someone spins it. And has to make an assumption about the person it lands on. About their um, sexual, ah. Proclivities. Like, how they are in bed.”

Zach makes a face. “Do we even _want_ to play this game? Because—”

“ _Yes_ ,” Sofia interrupts and makes grabby-hands at the bottle. “And me first, _please_.”

Chris always knew he loved Sofia. Right from the start.

“Wait wait wait! I haven’t finished with the rules!” Sofia withdraws her hand, but keeps the bottle in it as Zoë continues. “If your assumption is true, the person it’s about has to take a drink. If it’s false, _you_ have to drink.”

“How will we know if someone’s lying?” Karl asks, the interest in his face belying his initial pained groan of a reaction to the idea.

“Scout’s Honor?” Simon offers. Zoë shrugs in an agreeing sort of way.

“Except Pine, who can’t lie to save his life,” John adds.

“Hey,” Chris says, shoving at John’s knee. “I’m an _actor_. I lie for a _living_.”

“Pine, you’re _pretty_ for a living,” Zach says, and whatever, fuck _him_ anyway, like _he_ didn’t break into the business playing a sexpot villain, “but when you lie, your ears turn six kinds of pink.”

Chris rolls his eyes and shrugs and hates how hot his ears feel already. “Whatever. Maybe some of us don’t _want_ to lie. Maybe some of us aren’t into _weird shit_ in the boudoir.”

“The fact that you just called it ‘the boudoir’ tells me absolutely everything I need to know about a Chris Pine Encounter of the Intimate Kind,” Simon says. “Polite, respectful missionary. _Might_ know where the clitoris is. Will buy you brekkie and never call.”

“Save some for the game, bro.” Zach’s eyes are dancing with mirth and honestly? Chris wants to wipe the smirk right off his mouth. Possibly with Chris’s mouth.

“Wait,” Sofia is eyeing them all like there’s a huge joke she’s not in on, and therefore must be the butt of, “you’re telling me _none_ of you have ever slept together? In all this time? Come on.”

They all kind of pause to look around, almost as if they need to take stock and count on their fingers, but it’s true: despite the chemistry, or maybe because of it, because of the want to preserve it, it’s never happened. If Chris were a betting man he knows which couplings he’d bet on, but he’s also eminently aware of everyone else’s opinion on that, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Everyone kinda shrugs and John says, “What can we say? All bark and no bite. Not even the sexy kind.”

Sofia shakes her head as she finally ( _finally_ ) lowers the bottle to the table and moves this thing along. “I don’t know, guys. I feel like you owe it to humankind to find out what beautiful things will happen when your DNA combines. Like, kind of a waste, if you ask me.”

“That would require entirely too much of _my_ DNA,” Zoë says, and at just the right moment and in just the right tone to defuse all the awkward tension that’s fallen over two thirds of the group, and everyone just laughs. _The first rule of fight club_ , Chris thinks.

Sofia shrugs, spins, and lands on John. He preens a little in her direction.

“Hmm.” She taps a finger against her nose. “I think John Cho likes it a little rough.”

John blinks, and then breaks out into the biggest shiteating grin Chris has ever seen on anyone, including Zach that time they were at the Golden Globes and Chris kept talking about how he was absolutely _positive_ Allison Janney had been checking him out all night until Allison Janney did in fact come over to chat, but in tow behind her was her beautiful 35 year old boyfriend, who wanted to pitch Zach some Behind the Door project or other. Actually, Zach hadn’t been nearly as uncooperative as Chris would have preferred. He’s pretty sure they’re still in talks.

“Giving or receiving? Because—” Simon pipes up, only to be cut off by John as he pitches forward to take his turn spinning.

“Whatever’s your pleasure, Simon, I’m a versatile kind of guy… oh shit, it’s Pine… that’s on Pine, right? See, it might have been Karl, but Pine’s legs are spread, like, across the entire couch.”

Chris leans back and crosses both his arms and his legs and smiles. “By all means.”

“I don’t even have to pretend to think about this one: our friend and colleague, the Kirk to Zach’s Spock, oh Captain our Captain Christopher Whitelaw Pine is, actually, a _secret bottom_.” And, like an asshole, John looks completely pleased with himself.

Alternatively: Sofia looks puzzled, and Karl looks vaguely alarmed, and all the skin on the back of Chris’s neck and stretched over his knuckles turns hot and cold and pins-and-needles all over; and yeah, there goes Chris’s tongue too, so he cocks his head and quirks an eyebrow and hopes he looks sufficiently casual (and, you know, like he’s still able to breathe).

Zoë whoops and Simon chokes on a sip of his drink and John’s eyes go wide at Chris’s lack of response. “Don’t even try to deny it!” he says, and like, Chris wasn’t going to, but it’s also not like he was gonna let John just get away with it like that.

Sofia keeps frowning doubtfully. “That’s a _secret_?”

Zoë just about collapses sideways, wheezing, into Zach’s lap. Zach hasn’t moved much besides the outside corner of his mouth, but as far as Chris is concerned, that’s quite enough.

“All right, all right.” Honestly, Chris has no idea why he keeps hanging out with any of them, if they’re gonna pull shit like this! “Hardy-har, very funny. Captain Kirk likes to be bossed around. _Hilarious_. Are we done here?”

John nods as solemnly as he’s able while rubbing what Chris guesses are meant to be soothing circles into Karl’s—who still looks like he just swallowed something that got stuck halfway down—back. “Just as soon as we, as a group, agree that actually using the term _hardy-har_ has done very little to improve upon the whole, you know, _boudoir_ situation.” And then Simon’s off in another fit of giggles, and Zoë’s absolutely hopeless, and Zach’s almost fully smirking now; darkly, anyway.

Chris would’ve been fine to just leave it at that too if the realization hadn’t come careening into him like a ninety-pound labrador puppy, but it does come and it knocks him ass over teakettle and he finds himself staring Zach straight in the (molten, bemused, weirdly intense) eye as though that’s the only direction in the whole room boasting equilibrium as he lifts the pony neck to his mouth and takes a long, deep, beer-finishing swig.

The game keeps going but Chris stops keeping track. It’s all stuff they all know, stuff they’ve said and (mostly) stories they’ve told before. Maybe it’s fun for Sofia. Maybe it gives some context to the rest of it.

Sometimes Chris wonders what might’ve happened if he’d grown a pair and done something about it two years ago. He really truly had been about to. It’s just—well, like Zach said: for all they know, infinite versions of them exist in an infinite number of timelines; he just doesn’t really care about any of those versions. He wants to get _this_ version right.

 

**far out, so far out (valentine’s day 2017)**

“Are you… are you asking me about… _Pine_.” Chris makes an indignant kind of sound and even from over the phone, from 3,000 miles away, Zach just knows how red his cute little ears must be.

“I’m not—not _specifically_ ,” he clarifies, but his voice has gone weirdly squeaky, “I just—you know. I’ve never. With anyone. I just _wondered_ , you know, like, for the best interests of my future partners.”

Zach cannot _believe_ Chris thinks he’s buying any of this. “Uh-huh.”

“You know what, never mind, I don’t know why I even bother—”

“Mostly, it’s soft. Kinda tickles,” Zach interrupts, and Chris’s end of the line goes dead silent. “I mean, I can only speak from my own limited experience… and from the observed experience of anyone I’ve slept with while bearded, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Pine… are you seriously trying to tell me you’ve _never_ had beard burn between your thighs?”

“Zach…”

“I’m seriously asking… it’s not that I don’t believe you it’s just… it’s really difficult to believe, is all.”

“ _Beard burn_ , ironically enough, is what happens when the beard isn’t _actually_ grown in yet,” Chris says, and yeah, it’s for sure an evasive tactic.

“True,” Zach concedes. “So you’ve had beard burn. But you’ve never had like, a full beard anywhere near… it—there? Not _ever_?”

“As much fun as this conversation has been for me, I can assure you that if I had, I wouldn’t have started it.”

“Huh.” And it’s not like Zach _means_ to, but he can’t help the string of visuals that come with that train of thought… Chris’s sweet round backside thrust up in the air, his face pressed into his own forearms, his giggles muffled as big firm hands spread him apart—okay fine, _Zach’s_ hands spread him apart—so he can rub his impeccably groomed, superbly hairy jaw and face all over him. He can just see it: how prettily pink that skin must get with any friction against it at all.

It’s absurd, of course, but Zach’s suddenly and inexplicably pleased that he spends so much goddamned time rubbing oils and waxes and the like into his beard to keep it soft and smooth and lovely to the touch.

“Zachary.”

“Hmm?”

“Whatever it is you’re thinking… stop, probably.”

Zach smiles, sharklike, thinks it’s probably for the best this conversation isn’t happening in person. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

Chris snorts.

“Haven’t you ever… you know… when _you_ have a beard?” Zach wants to know.

Chris makes an indistinct sound in his throat. “Not exactly. Like, the menu has been pretty… vanilla, in that regard. On both sides.”

The penny drops. “Christopher,” he breathes, “you’re not even talking about giving head _at all_ , are you?”

“Was that not—was that not clear?”

Zach slaps his hand over his own mouth to keep from yelping, so what he says next comes out something like “Omfnggrrdrprmn!”

“Pardon?”

“Oh my fucking _god_ , you’ve never been eaten out? Like at _all_? Ever? And you’ve never… oh my _god_.”

“Listen, if I wanted to be humiliated I could have called any number of other people. My shrink. My sister. The girl I went to prom with who was _totally_ DTF but Little Christopher just _would not get on board_ —”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s just. You’re thirty-six years old, Pine. It’s time to start _living_.”

There’s a heavy sort of silence and then, quietly, Chris says, “Yeah, well. Maybe you’re right.”

Zach’s not sure why this of all things is what makes him feel guilty, but it does. “Aw, I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s kind of, you know. An intimate thing. And _definitely_ not something everyone is into. It’ll happen. Y’know. If you want it to.” God, there really is no casual way to say that, is there.

“Thanks, Mr. Kotter,” Chris quips, and that does it—breaks the tension, eases them back into (relatively) safe territory. “I can always count on you to teach me everything I need to know about life in twenty-two minutes or less.”

“Happy to oblige, Boom-Boom.” Zach stretches out a bit more on his sofa and puts his feet up on the coffee table. “What brought all this on, anyway? Researching for a role?”

“If you _must_ know, it was just something I saw. Online.”

 _Interesting_. “Mmmmhm… wanna narrow that down a bit more than, say, the entire Internet?”

“I was just you know, like, looking through Instagram or whatever, the other day.”

“You don’t even _have_ an Instagram. You don’t even have a _smartphone_.”

“I know… I mean, I do, sort of. I just look at it on my computer sometimes. Gotta keep my eye on all of you social media queens and your hashtags and your T-B-Ts, whatever that means.”

Zach laughs then, that familiar feeling of _helplessly fond_ washing over him the way it always does when Chris is involved. “What tags were you even searching? Lumberjack daddies? Big hungry bears? C’mon Chris, if you were watching gay porn I’m definitely on the safe list of people you can tell.”

The pause before Chris’s response is just a little too long to be natural, and then it hits him—yesterday afternoon, in his car—on his way to the barber—

“Sasquatch hotties and the conspiracy theorists who love them, actually,” Chris replies, eventually, but it’s weak and all kinds of delayed.

“Well, you know what they say,” Zach says, admittedly a little awkwardly, “ _be_ the Sasquatch hottie you wish to see in the world.”

“Now _that_ I can do,” Chris says, and just like that, they’re back on safe ground. For better or worse, Zach supposes. _Again_.

“I noticed… no offense dude but maybe that giant curtain of man-hair blocking your entire face and neck is why things have been so, you know. _Vanilla_. Lately.”

“Eat my dick,” Chris says, sounds just as helplessly fond as Zach feels.

“Mmm, with relish.” And they’re off to the races, quoting _Grease_ and harmonizing “Summer Lovin’” and lamenting the slow, painful downward spiral of Jeff Conaway, who was _totally_ hotter than John Travolta ever was, hands-down.

 

**trying to follow your ideal (february 2017)**

Gal’s _thoughtful_ face is kind of unnerving, if Chris is completely honest. Only because he’s come to find that, obviously outside of Amazonian context, the punches Gal’s willing to pull are few and far between, and right here and now definitely does not qualify for special consideration.

“No, it’s true,” she says finally, leaning back against the cushioned booth and taking a delicate sip of cava. “Christopher actually is _objectively_ a good kisser.”

Chris grins as smugly as he’s able in Zach’s general direction. “Told you.”

Zach looks unaffected, which is pretty fucking annoying. “How is that even a thing, though? Like, what makes someone _objectively_ a good kisser? That’s not real.”

Chris looks at Gal, who, in Chris’s opinion anyway, could’ve been a _skosh_ more enthusiastic than the little half-shrug she throws him.

“I don’t know exactly how to explain it but since it’s not just me who says so I have to assume it has something to do with, like, _reacting_ , or something.” And there’s the other half of that shrug. “Maybe good kissers are just, I don’t know; good at kissing back?”

 _Fan_ tastic. “As if there’s a difference!” Chris protests.

“There _is_ , though,” Zach says, and wow, okay, if Zach is really gonna go there then Chris is having _none of it_. “Shouldn’t good kissers be able to _control_ a kiss? Like, if someone’s a shitty kisser and all you can do is be shitty back at them that doesn’t make you a good kisser it just makes you weirdly polite.”

“To be fair,” interjects Yaron from behind his seventy-five dollar glass of scotch, “there are different ways to be good at something. Maybe some people like to control things. Maybe some people like to give other people what they want. This is not so bad, I wouldn’t think.”

“Well,” Zach murmurs, “ _that’s_ true.”

And then sort of organically the subject changes, as it is wont to do in any stakeless stalemate, but honestly? Chris is pissed off. What, Zach just gets to dismiss him like that, and he doesn’t even rate a chance to fight back, to defend himself? And why should it even bother him so much, anyway? That alone pisses him off even _more_.

When Chris excuses himself (well: when he pushes himself bodily up and away from the table in the middle of Zach’s next round of sentences) it’s deliberately abrupt; he feels a little sheepish when Yaron’s arm shoots out to keep Gal’s drink from landing in her lap (and really, _that’s_ a little dramatic—the table barely jostled).  It’s not like he was trying to be subtle or anything but sometimes he really wishes he could find that line, that tasteful mythical perfect balance between confidently making a point and hammering it directly into the foreheads of everyone who happens to be around to witness it. He’s so goddamned sick of feeling like a walking hyperbole.

The bathrooms are swank, single-stall affairs with flattering lighting and little baskets of useful shit like condoms and pantyhose, like at a bar mitzvah. He pops a few Tic Tacs because they’re there and shakes his head sternly at himself in the mirror. _Quit being a tool_.

He was all set to head back and make nice but Zach finds him first. The little vestibule that feeds into the restrooms, the coatroom, and probably some other rooms they’re not supposed to know about is dark and quiet despite the crowd of the bar, but it’s early yet. The ceremony only just finished an hour ago; it’ll be another twenty minutes or so before the It crowd starts making surreptitious group trips to the lav, so they’re all alone in what probably feels like way more of a private space than it actually is when Zach gets right up in his face, not even really in a friendly way, and (playfully? Was that playful?) shoves at his shoulder.

“Pine. What is _wrong_ with you?”

Chris gapes; unattractively, he imagines. “What’s wrong with _me_?”

Zach’s hands are on his hips now and it’s a little too dim to tell if the upturn of his mouth has any actual mirth to it. “Yeah, actually. What is your damage? This is like, kind of a big deal. It’s a pretty important industry event and you agreed to present a pretty meaningful award to me and you show up looking like, I don’t know, fucking K.D. Lang at her nephew’s science fair? Is there something we need to discuss?”

And—that’s not fair—that can’t be fair. Chris had to grow his hair out long for Ava, he’s gotta shave his face clean for Zach—“Did you just, like, hurl a homophobic slur at me?” he hisses.

“Whoa, Chris, relax. Yes, you look like someone’s lesbian aunt, but _lesbian_ is not a slur.”

“Unbelievable,” he seethes, and is about to push past Zach when Zach grabs his arm and whirls him around again.

“Seriously, dude, what. Are you even _trying_? What’s going _on_ with you?”

And honestly, Chris is sick of it—he really is! They’ve been dancing around this thing for ten years now—a fucking _decade_ —and he’s fucking _tired_ of it! He’s done, he’s ready. It’s time to shit or get off the pot.

His body makes the decision long before his brain’s on board and that’s how he finds himself with a hand halfway down the back of Zach’s pants, one thigh wedged between Zach’s legs and the fingers of his other hand tight in Zach’s floppy black hair as Chris presses him quick and hard against the velvety wallpaper lining the narrow bit of wall running between the bathrooms from the coatroom. Chris’s breath goes ragged and shallow as his consciousness catches up and he sneers right into Zach’s mouth just before he kisses him, rough and hot and slick, bites at Zach’s lips mercilessly, sucks Zach’s bottom lip between his teeth and dives back in again for the top one.

Chris has never kissed anyone like this. He didn’t even know he _could_ kiss like this. He’s pretty sure he’s gonna just stay here and keep on kissing Zach filthy like this forever, or for at least as long as Zach will let him. Which is pretty much when the recollection interrupts perhaps a moment too late that, _oh yeah_ , Chris is actually absolutely and totally _pissed off with Zach_.

He pulls off and away, grits his teeth; pushes back and presses his hot face into the collar of Zach’s stupid plaid sportcoat.

Zach shoves at him again:  _not_ playful. “What the _hell_ was that?!” He looks thunderously angry. His neck and cheeks are flushed and he’s breathing heavy, they’re both out of breath. Chris presses the heel of one hand to his groin, lifts the other to wipe at his upper lip.

“That,” he says, and fucking _hell_ , is he _really_ still out of breath? _Right_ now? “ _That_. Was a good kiss.”

Zach’s eyebrows lift and then he’s laughing. He just fucking loses it, laughs and laughs and _laughs_. So Chris shakes his head and takes a big deep breath and laughs too.

“ _That’s_ why you were mad?” Zach’s rolling his eyes but he doesn’t look angry anymore. “Jesus, Chris. I fucking—I fucking _know_ you’re a good kisser. Remember, that one house party, like, ten years ago? Right before filming? I mean, I know you’re kind of a ho-bag but I hoped you’d at least remember _me_.”

And it’s not why Chris was mad; well, okay, it is: it _is_ why Chris is mad, and he _obviously_ remembers kissing Zach. _Zach’s_ the one who acted like he’d never even so much as considered the _idea_ of kissing Chris! But that isn’t the point. All at once Chris is pretty sure he missed the point a long time ago, so he just shrugs and laughs some more.

“Well, shit,” he says.

 

**wear your real eyes (june 2017)**

“I think,” Chris declares, and his words are sort of running together like syrup and butter on a stack of pancakes, so Zach’s pretty sure he’s gotta be truly drunk, “that this has been the most romantic day of my entire life.” He punctuates with a hiccup, and Zach snorts into the beer he’s about to sip.

“Beautiful, Pine. It’s just coming up on six o’clock, by the way. You know. What the plebes call _dinnertime_.”

“Fuck you,” Chris lobs easily, and collapses onto Zach’s sofa in a graceful heap, tucked into the corner like a pile of laundry waiting to be folded. “I’m not that drunk.”

“You are,” Zach says, “absolutely that drunk. And kind of a lightweight.”

Chris levels him with slow-to-focus baby blues and a charmingly goofy grin. “Well, whatever, man. My movie is fuckin’ _awesome_. I deserve to celebrate.”

“Pretty sure it’s Gal’s movie. But seeing as Gal’s movie gave you the chance to make out with Gal, I can understand why you’re feeling pretty self-congratulatory.”

Chris rolls his eyes and leans forward so hard he all but falls into Zach’s lap trying to commandeer the beer bottle. Zach yelps and laughs, shoves at Chris’s shoulder but gives up with decent grace. “You dick, I would’ve just brought you one.”

Chris swigs quick and deep before handing the bottle back over and turning onto his back. He lies there, head pillowed on Zach’s thigh, bare feet crossed and propped up on the arm of the couch. “It tastes better when it’s yours.”

“If I had a nickel,” Zach says, and he hates this. He does. He loves it, of course he loves it, but he fucking hates it a lot too, the way Chris can do this, can just come back into his life every goddamned time and spread himself out again, all golden and smooth and beautiful all over, unselfconscious, all over Zach’s life and Zach’s things and even just, like, Zach himself. As if, after everything, he has no idea what it does to Zach. As if Zach’s supposed to be some kind of superhuman, totally indifferent and completely immune to this gorgeous asshole who, _oh yeah_ , Zach fucking _loves_ , with his face about three inches from Zach’s dick, wearing a pink-lipped, honey-warm smile.

For his part, Chris closes his eyes and makes a low hum of contentment that Zach can feel all the way up and down his spine and he wills his dick to behave itself. “I can’t believe I actually got to go to one of my movies and like, _watch_ the movie.”

“That fond of looking at yourself, are you?” It’s Zach’s birthday weekend, but it’s also Chris’s big premiere weekend, and fuck if Zach’s gonna let one overshadow the other. Chris did the whole birthday shebang with him, even though he must have been absolutely dead on his feet, so the least Zach could do was steal Chris away from all the press and red carpets for a Sunday matinee and a dirty martini (or, in Chris’s case, six) at the Nitehawk.

Chris lifts a hand like he means to swat at Zach but misses and winds up twisting his fingers into Zach’s hair a little bit. Because of course he does. Because it’s always been Zach’s most ardent hope that things will _finally_ happen with Chris after he turns his face forty-five degrees and basically dickslaps himself on Zach’s crotch. “Obviously not. Shut up. I don’t care about _me_. That movie was just… fucking awesome though. Gal was awesome. Connie was awesome. _Robin fucking Wright_ was awesome!”

Zach pushes Chris’s hand out of his hair, but it’s not the best move, since Chris lets his hand fall backward over his own head, which inspires him to lift the other arm and give a big old stretch, leaving him more or less draped all over Zach’s lap like some kind of sexual torture device. The cool scent of Speed Stick mixed with clean sweat assaults Zach’s olfactory senses and he breathes out hard through his nose and mouth. “I’ll give you that.”

“Not super crazy about that scene with the lasso though. Do you think I looked like I was constipated? That’s my pooping face, I think.”

“There’s a full five minutes of you standing naked fondling your own junk, but you’re worried about your pooping face.”

“Don’t front like you didn’t love it,” and Zach’s about to issue an absolutely scathing clapback when Chris sits up so suddenly Zach nearly spills beer all over himself.

“Christopher,” Zach admonishes, but Chris is already up off the couch and making a beeline for Zach’s bedroom. “You know, it’s kinda weird to just—” And he cuts himself off as he hears something that sounds an awful lot like a bunch of his shit just fucking falling on the floor. “Chris, the fuck?”

“It’s fine!” Chris yells, and who even knows what _that_ means, so Zach’s about to get up and survey the damage when Chris reappears. His shirt is off for some heretofore unexpressed reason, and when Zach finally forces his eyes up beyond the way Chris’s abdomen divots into his hips he realizes that yeah, okay, he should have seen that coming. Chris is drunk, and he’s handsy when he’s drunk, and he’s nostalgic and affectionate and _stupid_ and has always had a bizarre fascination with that one Halloween when Zach attended John Cho’s annual costume party dressed as Indiana Jones.

And Chris has found the whip.

“Chris, buddy. That’s not a lasso.”

Chris shrugs. “Close enough.”

Zach licks his lips, twice. It feels like all his salivary glands have weirdly kicked into overdrive. “It’s, uh. Also not, uh. It’s not like, you know. A costume. Whip.” He’s pretty sure his face has gone a complicated shade of purple.

Realization is slow to dawn on Chris’s face, but it’s sweet as hell and kind of a turn-on, and Zach sorta forgets to be embarrassed for just long enough that his dick signals interest. His jeans are dark, and tight, and he can spread his legs a little more without Chris noticing anything. He’s pretty sure. Chris is _pretty_ drunk.

“So,” Chris says, looping the whip loosely while running the fattest bits of it through his hands, “what you’re saying is, I really _could_ use this guy to learn all your secrets.” Chris is grinning now in a devastating sort of way Zach’s not so sure he likes. No—scratch that. Zach’s sure he likes it, but he’s not so sure it’s a great idea to be liking it _so much_.

“Chris—” Zach says weakly, but doesn’t trust his voice not to break as Chris advances on him, holding the whip with all kinds of improper posture and basically looking so criminally appealing it doesn’t fucking matter one little bit.

“C’mon Zach,” Chris cajoles, practically _whines_ , is all but whispering, and _fuck_ , that’s not _fair_ , Chris _has_ to know what he’s doing, what he looks like. Drunk as he is, he can’t possibly be _that_ obtuse. Zach squirms a little helplessly as Chris stands in front of him, looming like a threat of an incredibly ill-advised lapdance. He doesn’t fall into Zach’s lap, though. With a surprising amount of grace for a man who’s just killed half a bottle of Ketel One to his face, he places a knee on either side of Zach’s hips, and slings the whip around Zach’s shoulders.

And then the fucker gets _right in close to Zach’s ear_ like a _fucking asshole_ and goes all throaty sex-voice at him. “Tell me your secrets.”

Zach laughs a little and tries to shrug him off, so Chris leans even more heavily, gets right up in his face with it. “Za-aach. Tell me. Tell me one secret. Anything. Tell me something no one else knows.”

Chris’s eyes are heavy-lidded and unfocused and his lips are so stupid pink, and he smells amazing and Zach has given up all hope of controlling the rapid blood flow to his groin. He gets his hands around Chris’s (disgustingly, beautifully narrow) waist and he’s almost positive his intention was to shove Chris off of him, hard, hard enough to defuse the situation, to refold himself on the couch into a shape that hides how fat his dick feels in his pants, but what he does is growl and yank Chris down so his lush ass lands a bulls-eye, right in Zach’s lap, and yeah, there’s no way Chris can’t feel how hard he is.

Chris blinks and his mouth drops open and he lets out a breathy little “Oh!” before he giggles and falls sideways and pretty much just passes the fuck out right there with his face mashed into the back cushion of the sofa, still (mostly) clothed, one leg still awkwardly draped over Zach’s lap.

“Well, shit,” he says.

 

**oh sorry but your so-called life (june 2017)**

When Chris is able to comprehend the concept of consciousness again, it’s definitely morning, and not even early morning. He must have crashed _so_ hard after all those weeks of interviews and press junkets and travelling. He remembers it being sometime in the early evening when they got back from the movie when he (must have) fallen asleep on the couch. Well. That’s embarrassing.

He yawns and sits up and sort of idly looks around Zach’s guest bedroom.

 _Wait—_ what?

He struggles with his most recent memory, the one that’s telling him that this morning’s scenery is _all wrong_ , the hazy one of Zach shaking his shoulder and his shoulder shaking Zach off as Chris smushed his face further into the corner of Zach’s stupid-comfortable sofa.

He rolls off the bed and hazards a go at standing upright, stumbles a bit over what turns out to be one of his shoes that, until then, had been sitting next to its mate rather neatly on the floor at the bottom right corner of the bed. He falls back onto the bed, on his elbows, and he notices: the button on his fly is popped, too, though the zip is still done all the way up; for comfort, then.

The pieces sort of start slotting together after that, and Chris groans. Could almost cry, he thinks, if his cotton-dry tear ducts could spare the moisture.

After all of it, he’s here. _Here_ —where Zach and everything Chris loves about Zach lives, in the color-coordinated collection of guest towels and soaps, the obviously new clean white tee shirt and the worn-in pair of jeans Chris knows for a fact are not only a.) _his_ but b.) freshly laundered, all in a modest little pile on the bureau, by the door. The closed door. On the wall perpendicular to the very much shaded and curtained windows.

Chris made an idiot of himself last night, at the theater, in the street, on Zach’s stupid grey-beige sectional. Right in Zach’s lap. And Zach just put him to bed: Zach, who has any number of new and clean things for him, always at the ready; Zach, who shut the blinds and the curtains and the door against what probably is a _deserved_ amount of punishing daylight on what’s shaping up to be a _spectacular_ hangover; Zach, who unlaced and removed Chris’s shoes and set them by the bed, who popped open just the button of Chris’s fly so he wouldn’t wake up all crampy in his stomach, like Zach knows Chris _hates_. Zach who is always too gentle with him even when Chris is practically begging to be worked over rough. He sits up, pushes his hands through the putting green bristles of his hair, takes stock of what he knows to be true.

Yeah, Zach wants him; but also Zach _loves_ him.

And, he’s pretty sure, has been pretty sure for going on about a decade now, _he_ loves Zach.

So why the ever-loving blessed blue-balling _fuck_ was all of this so difficult?

The thing about Zach is that he’s wonderful, and as such he has the kind of place where, if you’re the only, lucky guest, you can really take your time to get more clean and less vomitory, and more or less ready to face the world again. Chris showers for about a week, cleans his teeth, uses all those skin cream things he’s supposed to use every day but only remembers if his skin is being dry or temperamental, and even _that’s_ a punch in the gut, because it means Zach knows what he’s supposed to use, too, and keeps some on hand. He puts on the clothes Zach laid out for him, because it’s the least he can do.

Zach’s sitting at the kitchen island on a barstool with a big white bowl in front of him, slowly transferring spoonfuls of cereal into his mouth. Kix, Chris notes, with almond milk, and strawberries.

“Morning,” Zach says, in some kind of way, and Chris isn’t really up to the task of interpreting it so he just smiles gratefully when Zach nods towards the big pitcher of ice water sitting off to the side of the sink, with an empty glass and a full bottle of ibuprofen next to it.

“Thanks,” Chris replies. “I mean, you too.”

“I didn’t have time to buy anything.” Zach shrugs down at his cereal. “We can go get something, if you like.”

“Nah, man, I’m good.” Truth is Chris still feels a little green around the gills but he’s pretty sure that has less to do with the hangover than it does his all-too-clear memory of the night before that keeps sharpening in his mind like a dream he keeps remembering more and more of. “I, uh… sorry about, you know, passing out like that. Guess everything sorta caught up with me.”

Zach’s lips purse briefly before his expression turns mechanically neutral. “Yeah, don’t worry about it.”

“And, you know, thanks for helping me to bed. Would’ve sucked, waking up on the couch.” Chris palms the back of his own neck and grimaces. “Not as young as I used to be.”

“No, none of us are.”

The inside of Chris’s head is a fucking horror show and he can’t stand the screaming for one second longer, which is the only reason he can possibly think of for saying what he does next: “You know, I don’t know why you always take such good care of me.”

For a minute there’s just silence which is actually kind of awful because it means all Chris hears is his own dumb voice reverberating around in his head saying the stupidest shit _ever_ while Zach just _stares_ at him.

Zach laughs but it’s not a nice sound. He shakes his head and picks up his bowl and spoon and the carton of almond milk. “Sure, whatever, Pine.”

“Sorry, I thought I just paid you a compliment; my mistake,” Chris snaps, and then shuts his own mouth in horror. “That’s not what I—”

“Are you _kidding_ me with this?” Zach’s standing at the sink with his back to Chris, hands gripping the lip of the countertop. He turns. “Look: you don’t have to like, pretend not to know, or whatever. You can just… we can just be adults about this. And not say shitty things like that.”

“Shitty things? It’s shitty to say you take care of me?”

“No, it’s shitty to say you don’t know _why._ ”

“I _don’t know_ why!” Chris yells, and ah fuck, now they’re yelling, “I could _guess_! I could make a very educated guess about why but I have never once been told outright, in any kind of way I could be sure about, why you—why it’s like this. Why it’s always been like this. But do I _know_ _anything_? No, Zach. I do not _know_ anything.”

“Are you—are you possibly being serious right now?”

“I just want to know why you keep fucking holding out on me!”  

The shock on Zach’s face is overtaken by a dark, sharp fury before he looks down and away, starts moving around, putting things away with vicious slams on cabinet doors. “You are _unbelievable_ , do you know that? Just the fact you would even _say_ it like that… what the fuck is that even supposed to _mean_?” He’s half muttering to himself, and if Chris had any sense, he’d back off, let things cool down and approach from a safer angle, later when things feel less like they’re about to unravel at the seams.

Chris knows he’s never been the most sensible of people. “I threw you against the wall of a restaurant and shoved my tongue down your throat in front of basically everyone we know, and you’re afraid to let me know that you, or I don’t even know, maybe just your _penis_ , kinda sorta _like_ -likes me? Zach, seriously man; is it me? Am I the idiot here? Why is it so difficult for you to give me a little credit here? To believe me when I tell you I fucking—I’m fucking in _love_ with you, okay? Have been for years. Actual, _literal_ years. What more do you want from me, Zach?”

“I don’t know, Christopher, might you be forgetting the time three years ago when I fucking _bared my soul_ to you and you made a joke about it and then never brought it up again?” Zach’s nostrils are flaring hard and Chris is reminded of nothing so much as a bull or a big dark stallion about to charge straight for him; he’s not sure why the mental image sends a shiver of anticipatory, liquid-hot arousal all through his veins. “Forgive me for not relishing the idea of prolonging the rejection. You’ve always been a fucking flirt, Pine. What was I supposed to do, keep chasing you just to, like, flatter your fragile frat-bro ego?”

“ _What_? After I totally bared _mine first_ , the fuck?”

“You mean when you told me you’d thought about _fucking_ me from time to time, but not, like, ever being my _boyfriend_? What was I supposed to think about that, exactly? I mean, come on, Chris! We’ve had uncomfortably detailed discussions about what it would be like to fuck _the Pope_!”

The hysterical ringing in Chris’s ears pauses just long enough for that to land and he draws up short and shuts his mouth, teeth clacking audibly together.

“Oh,” he says.

“Yeah, _oh_.”

Damned if he knows why, but somehow, Chris feels like it’s important to say, “I mean, like, only if the Pope were Jude Law!” and at the look on Zach’s face he sort of shrugs, sheepish, and adds, “I would think my feelings for you were less hypothetical than _that_.”

“Oh, well, you know how it is,” Zach says in a conspiratorial tone that’s as cutting as it is hyperbolic. “I’ve had my fair share of straight guys ask me some pretty pointed questions, only to haul off and mess me up pretty bad when I, as they put it, ‘misread the signals.’”

“Come on, man, you know I’d never—and anyway, you _know_ I’m not straight—”

“You are if it ever got out I that went after you, and you didn’t like it.” Zach shrugs. “It’s not something you ever have to think about, and I get that. I but _I_ do. And yeah, of course I don’t think you’d _hit_ me, or anything like that. But I can’t—there are a lot of people who wouldn’t hit me.”  

Chris exhales, long and low, rubs the back of his own neck and says, if a little sheepishly, “I guess I haven’t really been that fair to you recently. Or, you know. Possibly ever.”

“No,” Zach says. “I mean, it’s not like I made it easy for you, or anything. But yeah, no. You haven’t.” He’s finally looking at Chris again, standing close enough that Chris can feel him there before he looks up.

When he does, Zach’s right there, right in front of him, all intense eyes and hot, quick breath. “I guess I just thought, you know. That you ought to be the one to do it. To make the first move. You know. ‘Cause you have the upper hand, and all.”

“How, exactly, do I even _remotely_ have the upper hand, like, at all? Ever?” But Zach doesn’t really sound upset anymore, not even annoyed. His mouth is twitching and his hands keep moving from his arms to his hips and back, like they don’t know where they want to land.

Chris chances it. “You know what I mean… the whole gay thing. Or at least, you know, the gay _sex_ thing.” Chris makes a gesture he’s not really sure he wants Zach to try and interpret. “You’ve been doing gay sex things for like… _way_ longer than I have.”

Zach’s eyes narrow, and his hot palms find Chris’s hips. “That’s a lie”

“Okay fine yeah. But you’ve been doing it more often. And _exclusively_. And better.”

Zach snorts. “Yeah, that will _never_ be a lie.”

Chris barks out a laugh, throws up his arms, “You know what, you egomaniacal queen, I’ll have you know I’m _excellent_ at gay sex things—”

“Sure, sure, get it in writing—” And that’s when Zach gets in close, close enough to duck under Chris’s open mouth to capture it, and yeah, it’s not the first time, but it’s just about the best thing Chris has ever felt. Zach’s lips are _gorgeous_ and he’s a hell of a kisser, and it’s all Chris can do to keep up, not to lose it completely when Zach uses the grip he has on Chris’s hips to pull him close and grind filthily against him as he licks and nibbles at Chris’s jawline, his earlobe, moves back down again to Chris’s mouth to pull hard on his upper lip.

Chris moans and pushes back and lets Zach suck the hell out of his tongue, sort of loses track of his own body for a while til the backs of his knees hit something solid, and oh right, Zach’s bed, Zach’s bedroom; although, weren’t they just in the kitchen? Chris can’t help but marvel at the beautiful convenience of a tiny two-bedroom Midtown apartment.

He loses the thread, anyway, because Zach’s pushing him back onto the bed and yanking at his clothes like they’ve offended him, pulling off Chris’s tee shirt and then his own so he can wrap all around Chris, skin to gloriously warm soft skin, and Chris groans into Zach’s mouth and runs his hands down Zach’s sides, squeezes at big handfuls of Zach’s ass and thighs.

And then quicker than Chris can keep track of whose hands are where his jeans are off and his dick is out, big and hard and curving slightly towards his own belly, the flushed pink tip meeting his navel in a wickedly obscene kiss. He looks up at Zach’s face, heretofore stoic, sexy, in control; now Zach’s eyes are wide and his mouth is turning up and his shoulders—yeah, that _fucker_ is _laughing_ —

“Dude! Don’t laugh at my dick! What the fuck,” Chris pulls back a hand to cup his own balls, as if to protect them from further insult.

“Oh my god, I am _not_ laughing at your _dick_ , you absolute child,” Zach says, reclaims Chris’s hand and gives the base of Chris’s dick a tentative little lick that tingles all the way down to the hot, tight coil of want at the base of Chris’s spine. “I’m just, like, throwing the the most _unbelievable_ shade at, I don’t know, _the entire universe_ right now for giving you a fucking… a fucking _dildo_ _dick_.”

“A what, now?” Chris pants, tries to focus on something other than the massive rush of blood flooding out from the middle of his body, throwing a deep flush that colors his chest pink, his nipples peaked and hard and very nearly red.

Zach’s fingers are splayed across Chris’s sternum and his breath moves hot over Chris’s dick before Zach does whatever the fuck he’s doing to make it blow cold again, and Chris shudders so hard he nearly knees Zach in the side of the head.

“Yikes,” Zach says, gripping Chris’s leg, “dude, chill. A dildo dick, you know. Like we should fucking manufacture this shit and make a billion dollars… . You know what? Forget it, I’m not really that into sharing,” and that’s about as much warning as Chris gets before Zach faceplants right on his dick, pulls Chris all the way down his hot wet _completely relaxed and swallowing throat_.

“ _Shit_ ,” Chris gasps.

And fuck if he can’t _feel_ Zach grinning around him, and it’s not like he’s complaining or anything but he’d rather not come quite so embarrassingly quickly, so he lets it go on about a minute more before he pulls on Zach’s biceps and shoulders, tugs at Zach’s hair as a whine gets caught at the back of his throat in the shape of begging for more of Zach’s deep delicious kisses. “Please,” Chris mumbles into Zach’s mouth, licks at the sweat and the scent of himself on Zach’s upper lip, “please, _please_ be naked.”

Chris smiles himself silly between kisses as he feels Zach wriggle out of his obscenely tented pajama pants. He doesn’t know if he wants to touch or or look first so he tries to do both, wrapping a hand backwards around Zach where he’s hot and hard and throbbing, watches in rapt fascination as a tiny clear bead of liquid forms at the tip and slowly rolls out of his slit and down under the head.

Chris would be embarrassed about the way his tongue’s already poking slightly out of bottom right side of his mouth just watching that, if he hadn’t been leaking all over himself for ages now. “Like _you_ should even talk, with the fucking dildo dick?”

“Pine, your dick is so pretty they wouldn’t even have to paint it a different shade of pink to sell it in stores. You gonna start writing sonnets about how pretty _my_ dick is?” Zach pets his hair.

 _Pretty_ isn’t the word Chris would use, no. Big, thick, redolent of the dirtiest bits of sex, the slick red head of it just peeking from inside slowly retracting foreskin. Zach grooms for sure, but he’s still dark and musky, and there’s something so _masculine_ about him it makes Chris’s mouth water. Zach’s dick looks like a sculpture, is already somehow spit-and-lube-slick and a little lazy, not even all the way hard yet; Zach’s dick is fucking _incredible_.

He knows he’s ready to choke himself on it too, to see how see how much he’s able to get inside, and he opens his mouth reflexively, but Zach’s pushing him back again, all the way back against the small army of pillows defending the honor of Zach’s bed during the day, and Chris windmills one of his arms backwards to clear a flat space to land. Zach growls a little.

“Turn over,” he says, yanking the remaining pillow behind Chris’s head from underneath him.

Chris flails for a moment, then props up on his elbows. “Uh, Zach, like, believe me when I say the spirit is willing, but uh, I’m not sure—”

“Shut up,” Zach says. “Stop thinking. Don’t worry; just turn over.”

Chris tries not to think too hard about what it means that Zach’s brook-no-argument tone overrides every security code in his brain, but it does; he turns and at the same time Zach shoves the pillow under Chris’s hips and the head of his leaking dick rubs all along Zach’s ridiculously soft pillowcase, and he can’t quite bite back a moan. Zach’s hands are on him, hot and big and pressing into the tender flesh of Chris’s ass, and he can’t help but shiver as cool air floods in where Zach’s spreading him open.

“I seem to recall some fairly pointed questions about my facial hair,” Zach’s saying, and Chris almost forgot _talking_ is a thing, “and yeah, you _were_ that obvious; so I thought why not just give you the deluxe package?” and then he pushes his beautifully bearded face between Chris’s asscheeks and licks long wet and filthy up and down from top to taint.

The noise Chris _actually_ makes must be _inhuman_ : he can’t really hear it though, over all the crazy-hot screaming inside his own head.

And _fuck_ , it’s good. It’s _so_ good. It’s better and filthier and hotter than anything has any right to be and Chris doesn’t have enough breath in him to give much warning before he comes all over himself. And, because whatever, it’s there, Zach’s pillow.

Zach’s wiping his face and groaning and shoving at Chris and making some kind of fuss over the state of his pillowcase, and it’s really spoiling the mood, if Chris is honest. “No offense but could you like, shut up for maybe thirty seconds and let me enjoy the afterglow? Christ almighty, quit being such a baby. You can use my pillow, then, if it’s such a big deal.”

“ _None_ of them are _your pillow_. I know it’s difficult to believe I don’t go out and buy brand-new tempur-pedic every time you’re here, but these pillows do, actually, _all_ belong to _me_.” Then Zach’s whaps him across the backside with what feels like one of the decorative beaded ones and Chris yelps and flops over onto his back.

“Listen, Casanova, if you wanna fuck me _now_ would be the time, because I’m about thirty seconds from crashing so hard I don’t care whose spunk is all over whose pillow.”

Zach cocks his head thoughtfully to the side as he takes Chris’s thighs in his hands and spreads them. Chris can feel himself, cool and wet and winking open; it’s dirty and delicious and his dick even starts to twitch a little, wouldn’t you know.

Whatever Zach’s looking for, he’s found it. He grins like something _feral_ and terrible and it makes Chris’s gut do a hot little somersault as Zach lines himself up and pushes in and then it’s all Chris can do to stay conscious, to hold onto the bed, to keep his hips lined up and thrusting, his painfully half-hard dick slapping wetly against his stomach.

Zach leans down and Chris whimpers as Zach does everything but put his lips on Chris’s face, his mouth, his neck; it’s a special brand of torture, Chris is pretty sure, the way Zach hovers and pants and breathes humid air, but stays just out of reach.

Chris is probably gonna die of exposure or something.

Then Zach groans and pulls his dick out just as he’s starting to shoot, the asshole, just so he can do it all over Chris’s face, his cheekbone and nose and chin, his clavicle, and with one or two last, feeble blurts, his belly.

“Fuck,” Zach grits out, and he’s breathing so heavy Chris feels like it’s fair to consider a compliment, “ _fuck_.”

Chris really couldn’t agree more. He’s not sure how but at some point he came, too, _again_ , however pitifully, and right now his abdomen looks like it’s got a layer of papier-mâché forming over it. He can’t really be bothered to move, though, so he closes his eyes and gives a happy little hum. “Yeah we did,” he all but slurs, and he might have felt the whisper of a washcloth swiping across his stomach, but it doesn’t seem so important. He sleeps.

 

**tomorrow is a long long time (august 2017)**

“Tell the truth,” Chris is saying as he stirs a frankly _offensive_ amount of honey into his iced green tea, “how long have you wanted to do this?”

Zach doesn’t even look up as he answers, “Christopher, you have a magnificent penis, but I’m not going to spend the rest of this relationship telling you how much I worship it.”

At that Chris nearly chokes on a mouthful of tea. “No, dipshit, not _that_! You know…” he gestures around them. They’re sitting together at one of the newer coffee shops that cropped up in Silverlake in the time Zach’s been away. Zach’s sprawled out on a big brown leather sofa, dutifully filling in a crossword, and Chris, once he settles, is plastered all along his side, chin hooked on Zach’s shoulder as he yelps answers into Zach’s ear as quickly as they come to him, and in whatever order. The fact that Zach’s ear is only a couple of inches from his mouth doesn’t seem to do much to curtail the volume. “Us. Here. In the light of day, or whatever.”

It’s corny and clichéd as all hell but if this whole thing finally came to a head on Zach’s birthday, it was sort of pleasingly symmetrical that yesterday, on Chris’s, they made it official. Telling-the-parents-and-publicists official. Suffering through Zoë’s shrieks and Cho’s smirk and Joe’s put-upon, melodramatic “ _Finally_!”, and the unsubtle way not just a few twenties seemed to change hands in the wake of the announcement. Honestly.

Zach would be irritable over it if he weren’t so stupid in love with his boyfriend.

He turns his head slightly and pecks Chris right on the tip of his unfairly adorable nose. “Since I was in utero.”

“ _Zach_.”

He sighs. “I don’t know, babe. Like always? It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I looked at you and realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life listening to that weird gurgling snore you do or taking a solid month to pick out a pasta maker because we had to find one with an attachment to make the little wheels you miss from Kraft mac and cheese, but here we are.”

“You say the sweetest things,” Chris sighs, and in front of the whole coffee shop and about five cellphone cameras, he kisses Zach square on the mouth.

Zach gapes. “You know that went viral, like, yesterday?”

Chris pulls a fake yawn. “And? I adore my idiot boyfriend, more at eleven? Big whoop.”

And Zach can’t really do anything with that but smile so hard it hurts and it’s fucking difficult to kiss someone like that, especially with so much tongue, but it’s worth the effort, right now. Chris is definitely worth it.


End file.
